Clever Banana stepped in to create a public-facing website for the Vancouver Spring Show in order to publicize the annual event and sell tickets online. The key challenge was turning the complicated, antiquated ticketing system into a conventional, easy-to-use tool that allows buyers to “reserve” a seat when they purchased tickets online.

Clever Fix:

Instead of building a standard website for the Vancouver Spring Show, Clever Banana opted to develop a single landing page with a modernized ticketing system built via a custom web application developed with Ruby on Rails.

In order to accommodate a ‘reserved seating’ ticket system, Clever Banana created a digital replica of the venue’s seating map. As a result, web visitors searching for tickets online were able to search for available seats from the site. The new web app centralized online ticket sales into an easily trackable one-stop channel, which was a huge improvement for the Vancouver Spring Show and helped to increase sales by 25%.

Clever Results:

The Vancouver Spring Show’s new and improved site is modern, on-brand and aids in telling the story of the event.

The upgraded ticketing system, developed from a custom web app, makes it easier for ticket buyers to reserve event tickets and purchase them online. The web app is a massive improvement from the original, clunky version which was hard for The Vancouver Spring Show organizers to track.

Together the new landing page and ticketing system have helped The Vancouver Spring Show increase their online ticket sales by 25%.

Phase 1 | Discover

Landscape Research & Flowchart Creation

Clever Banana kicked off the project by meeting and getting to know Shaun and The Vancouver Spring Show. After obtaining a deep understanding of the vision that Shaun had for the new event website and ticketing system, the Clever Banana team began researching the digital community event landscape to identify an industry standard.

Through this research, we found that almost all current offerings had powerful ticketing systems that often resulted in higher ticket sales. However, none of the systems had the visual punch we were after. After the research phase, the goal was clear: Clever Banana was challenged to design a ticketing interface that was more user-friendly and had the ability to enhance the ticket purchasing experience.

Finally, Clever Banana created a flowchart to demonstrate how website visitors would move through through the ticket purchasing experience. Similar to mocking up a website, the flowchart provides a better understanding of how the web app actually works and reduces the amount of development errors.

Phase one recap:

Attain a deep understanding of the current landscape through research and client meetings.

Ideate a new ticketing interface that meets the client and end-user needs.

Create the flowchart of the new ticket-purchasing web app.

Phase 2 | Design

Website Mock-up and Style Guide

To prepare for the new site, the Clever Banana design team coordinated with The Vancouver Spring Show to collect all of their existing brand assets and photography. The Vancouver Spring Show wanted to portray the unique vibe of the event through pictures and video. In order to do just that, Clever Banana drafted a simple long-scroll version of the site so that visitors were able to focus on the images and event information.

Phase two recap:

Collect brand assets, website content and photography

Create a style guide

Mockup new site

Phase 3 | Development

Develop Ruby on Rails Web App

In order to build a web application with a custom backend for the new advanced ticketing system, the Clever Banana team chose to work with Ruby on Rails, a powerful framework that allowed us to develop the app that best met the needs of The Vancouver Spring Show.

Additionally, Clever Banana set up a dashboard for The Vancouver Spring Show to display metrics that calculate their overall ticket selling percentage, revenue, net income and more. The web app was a huge improvement for The Vancouver Spring Show, and helped Shaun’s team reduce the amount of time they spent managing the ticket selling process by almost 50%.

Phase three recap:

Site development

Web app development with Ruby on Rails

Implementation of custom backend, including metrics dashboard

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